Extension
by beeftony
Summary: She's a piece of him that he didn't know he lost, the missing segment of a perfect trinity that she assumed was only two halves of a whole. But she can't put the puzzle back together on her own.
1. Nothing Quite Like It

**Chapter One**  
Nothing Quite Like It

_All the things one has forgotten scream for help in dreams._  
-Elias Canetti

Below the sunset, fresh waves pound the surf with a never-ending ebb and flow, giving moisture to the sand and then snatching it away in a process that has repeated itself throughout all of time. They crash against the rocks as well, becoming a fine mist that travels through the air and dampens her face as she watches the sun plunge into the middle of the ocean like a half-swallowed egg.

She's been here before.

But there were people then, a mother and her children sculpting primitive castles out of sand. Now they are elsewhere, banished phantoms returned to the subconscious that spawned them. They are formless once more, waiting to be summoned out of the ether like a half-remembered nightmare. Memories brought them back to the dreamer, forging a reality in which a single precious moment could be preserved for all eternity. But he refuses to be shackled by them now, leaving them abandoned on the dead side of forever.

She knows that the real children are with their father, who has returned to them from a nightmare that escaped the boundaries of the dream world and chased him across entire nations, never allowing him a moment to rest. But they will never know their mother again. It wasn't their mother she saw the first time anyway.

Only a memory.

She remembers another seashore, lined with an army of decaying skyscrapers that tumbled into the water after eroding in the absence of the dreamers who created them. Washing up on the shore of the other man's subconscious, she was treated to the image of a fractured, empty paradise, and the steady lapping of the waves reminded her that all things crumble with time, even in a dream.

She begins to walk, heading in the direction of a small beach house where once there rested an elevator. The hard wooden steps greet her with a hollow rapping noise as her feet make contact. She pounds her way up the stairs and into the house, not knowing where she's headed but irresistibly compelled to move.

The door opens to reveal a sterile white room, filled with an overwhelming collection of beeping machines. Confused, she glances back expecting to find the beach, but the ammonia-filled hallways of a hospital are all that welcome her. When she looks in front of her again, the room is occupied.

She steps forward timidly, not recognizing the people that suddenly seem a hundred miles away. Now they are close to her again, their faces revealed at last. One of them is standing over the bed, looking forlornly down at the figure that now commands her attention as well.

His face is closed to her, stony and unchanging. She knows that he has been in this state for quite some time, and the doctors have not been able to bring him out of it. His mind works perfectly, but they can't make him wake. He doesn't want to.

"Any change?" she hears herself ask.

The other figure, a tall woman with dark curls and deep brown eyes, turns to her and answers sadly: "No."

She is standing over him now, next to the other woman. Her hand travels of its own volition next to his face, but stops before it touches. "Do you think he can hear us?"

The woman shakes her head. "The doctors don't believe so."

"Is he ever going to come out of it?"

"I don't know."

Her attention turns to the woman, who now appears so much older than the time she saw her on the beach. A vague feeling of uneasiness attempts to rise within her, but she forces it down. Why would she feel uneasy around her? They've both been coming here since she was very young.

Now she looks at the man lying on the bed, and reaches out once more. When her fingers touch his face, his eyes snap open and stab her through the heart.

He glares at her with righteous fury for daring to wake him from his dream, and the scalpel that she never noticed before is suddenly in his hand.

Before she can react, he slashes it across her throat.

* * *

Ariadne's eyes snapped open only to be greeted with the familiar ceiling of her dorm room. A tiny gasp escaped her at roughly the same moment, a habit that she still hadn't entirely broken no matter how many times she perished in her nightmares. She sat up slowly, unconsciously clutching her jugular. She breathed, trying to remember the nightmare that had woken her with such force, but the finer details slid between her neurons and drained out of her like water through a sieve.

After a few moments, only the basic concepts came willingly when she sent a bucket down her mental well. Beach. Hospital. Mal. Cobb waking up from a coma and slicing open her neck. Things like that tended to stay with a person even after they woke.

Glancing at the tiny green digits of her alarm clock, she discerned that the time was four thirty. Damn it.

Ariadne reached over to her nightstand and placed the tip of her finger on top of the small chess piece that rested there. Her totem. If this was a dream, then when she tipped it over it would snap back immediately as if it rested on springs. Applying a small amount of force, she saw it topple and stay where it was.

She sighed. Good enough for her.

Putting her hands over her face, Ariadne enveloped herself in a world of darkness, one that seemed cramped and boundless the same time. The grogginess was clearing from her mind thanks to the little jolt of adrenaline that dying in the dream had given her, though she knew it would be back when it was time to go to her first class. That was in two hours. Goddamn early morning classes. She wasn't sure how any of her teachers slept at night, and not just because they had to get up even earlier than she did.

What did the dream mean? By now she could only remember Cobb, hot rage simmering behind those frigid blue eyes, carving open the skin of her throat so quickly that it actually burned. She had been told that the experience of dying in a dream ceased to be frightening after a while, but Ariadne actually preferred the terror. It let her know that she still accepted reality and wasn't trying to live in some fantasy world. The fact that she could still dream meant she wasn't as far gone as the rest of the crew.

Whom she hadn't seen in months, a small voice in the back of the Architect's head reminded her. While she understood the need to make themselves scarce after such a highly illegal invasion of someone's mind—even though they had actually improved Fischer's life—she had very few friends as it was. Now they were asking her to go back to reality, back to sketching buildings rather than creating them with her mind. She wished that they would have at least given her a Dreamshare device as a concession, but the technology was rare and tended to be used for things that were extremely illegal, not to mention morally dodgy. Wanting to own one just so she could experience pure creation wasn't worth the danger of having armed thugs knock down her door.

She stood up and wandered over to the bathroom. Ariadne wasn't one to wet her pants in fear, but all of a sudden it felt like her bladder was holding back a mighty reservoir and the walls of the dam were already starting to crack. She dropped her pajama bottoms and made herself one with the toilet, thankful for its unpleasant but ultimately necessary function. When she had emptied the remains of the water she'd consumed before bed, she sat for awhile, letting the cold porcelain keep her awake.

That quickly got tiring as well, and even though her roommate was out of town she couldn't help feeling self-conscious about squatting on a toilet in the hours before dawn debating whether or not she should go back to sleep. Standing up, she made herself decent again and ran warm water over her hands to wash away the germs. It was then that she realized she had forgotten to flush, and she managed to perform an impressive balancing act worthy of any circus as she depressed the lever with her toes.

Without thinking, she started rubbing two fingers and a thumb against her neck, feeling a strong pulse that quickened as her mind returned once more to the last thing she'd seen before being ejected from her dream into the real world. Cobb was angry with her. In the dream it had made perfect sense, but now that she was awake she had trouble fathoming what she could possibly have done to upset him.

Staring deep into her own reflection, Ariadne wondered why her natural dreams didn't make as much sense as they did when she was in the Dreamshare. Even though another semester had come and gone since the Fischer job, she still remembered most of the details as though they had happened to her in real life. But when she tried to recall what she'd dreamt of only five minutes ago, she kept coming up empty.

She wondered if the other members of their short-lived dream team had ever felt this way, or if it was just her who had trouble returning to a normal life. But then again, aside from Cobb, none of the others had really expressed a desire to go back to reality. As far as she knew they were still out there, still invading the dreams of unsuspecting targets and snatching their deepest, darkest secrets from the recesses of their minds with all the difficulty of stealing from an infant with a sweet tooth. For them it wasn't just a job or a one-time opportunity: it was how they lived.

On some level, she knew that what they did was wrong. She knew that they were aware of that as well. They weren't good guys, but in the few weeks that Ariadne had gotten to know them, she could tell that there were far worse people out there. In the world of corporate espionage, there was often very little difference between the thieves and their victims.

But she couldn't bring herself to think of them as criminals. Ariadne herself had taken Cobb up on his offer even after he explained to her that it wasn't strictly legal, though if he had asked her to do something more risqué than draw a maze that he couldn't solve, she would have told him exactly where he could shove that job offer. Her mother always taught her never to take rides with strangers, but he knew Professor Miles and that had been good enough for her.

She had helped him too, which was what made all the trouble they went through worth it in Ariadne's eyes. She had lived up to her name, guiding him through the labyrinth of his own subconscious and giving him the means to destroy the monster he'd imprisoned there. He was finally free of Mal, and he seemed better for it.

So why was he so angry with her in the dream? Was it something she did? Or perhaps it foretold something she would do, like an Albatross that circled over the sea of her subconscious, waiting to replace the scarf around her neck the moment she shot it down. She knew, from the reading she'd done after the job had given her a sudden obsession with dreaming, that the subconscious was able to absorb details from one's waking life and manufacture a dream in a pattern that could easily be mistaken for a prophecy.

Or maybe it didn't mean anything and she should stop snacking on her absent roommate's nachos right before she went to bed. Maybe it was just a random nightmare.

Ariadne sighed and plopped down onto the bed, uncertain of whether she really intended to sleep again or not. It could mean a return to the hospital where Cobb murdered her, or she could luck out and dream of something completely unrelated.

In the end, she simply closed her eyes and let her body decide how tired it was.

* * *

It was three hours later, after her class ended, when she got the call she didn't know she'd been waiting for. The Caller ID was blocked, but Ariadne was not afraid. If this didn't turn out to be the person she was hoping for, all she had to do was hang up.

"Hello?"

"Have you been dreaming okay?"

If it were any other voice that asked her that, Ariadne would have slammed the phone shut and hurled it into one of the many fountains that decorated the campus. Instead, she smiled.

"I was actually just thinking about you this morning."

"Thinking?" the voice asked in return. "Not dreaming?"

"Oh, I've been dreaming," she replied honestly, not wanting to give him the details. "Just not about you."

"I see."

"So, as cool as it is to talk with you again, I don't think you called me just to discuss my sleep habits."

She could just imagine his smirk on the other end. "Got another job. Interested?"

Ariadne hesitated for just a moment. She'd been wanting to go back to the world of dreams ever since they all split up at the airport, but the sudden call had effectively frozen the Architect with uncertainty. It took a while to formulate a reply.

"What kind of job is it?"

"Another inception. After the first one went so well we've gotten a lot more job offers. But it's not going to be possible without you."

Icicles formed on her spine as she processed that. They had barely managed to pull off one inception, and it had very nearly resulted in all of them getting stuck in Limbo for an effective eternity. And as much as she loved raising cities from the earth with nothing more than her imagination, she would prefer to avoid any nasty surprises this time around. She had to think about it for even longer.

"You don't have to answer right away," the voice reassured her. "But if you do decide to join us, we're meeting in the workshop at six o'clock."

"Okay," she answered somewhat dazedly. "See you then..." She wondered whether it was safe to utter his name on an open line, but decided to risk it anyway. "Arthur."

It was only after she hung up that she realized by promising to be there, Ariadne had basically given her consent without even meaning to. She was still uncertain about this, right? Even though the Fischer job had been the most exhilarating experience of her young life, she understood that in the real world, there were plans that needed to be made and consequences for her actions. Final exams provided enough pressure without her having to worry about staying alive until the sedatives wore off so that she wouldn't be trapped in that world of neglected skyscrapers.

Then again, Ariadne had thought she was finished as soon as Mal knifed her in the gut. But even with those risks, she'd still returned and taken the challenge because, as Arthur had said, there was nothing quite like it. And now that she had heard his voice again, a tiny part of her admitted that she really wanted to reunite with the man who invited her to kiss him as a distraction and then casually declared that it was worth a shot. Her mind had been swirling too much from transitioning back to reality for her to even think of approaching him at the airport and asking what that moment meant.

So it was with a shrug and a silent curse of her lack of willpower that Ariadne caved into the temptation and made plans to visit the workshop at the appointed time. There really was nothing quite like it.

* * *

The workshop hadn't changed much since she last visited. The decomposing paint had all but gone to join the dinosaurs in extinction, revealing the cold gray concrete underneath that had always been there. She had been tempted many times to refer to it as a warehouse, but given that it didn't actually house wares the title wasn't quite appropriate.

Inside she knew there rested a veritable bone yard of abandoned machines, alongside desks and lawn chairs as well as the designs from the Fischer job that they never bothered throwing away. Since the building had been bought and paid for by Cobb and Arthur, they didn't have to worry about some night watchman snooping through the interior and uncovering a plot to break up a multinational corporation by planting an idea inside the mind of its heir. An obscene amount of windows offered as much light as they could without compromising structural integrity, and saved a bundle on the electricity budget to boot.

As she grabbed the handle of one of the wide double doors, it suddenly occurred to Ariadne that she had no idea how to go about reintroducing herself to everyone. She knew that Arthur sounded as excited as he possibly could, which for normal people tended to sound like detached boredom. Eames, if he was here at all, would probably pass the time by being a nuisance to everybody. Yusuf would likely be rambling on about his chemicals, and she didn't know whether to expect Saito or not. His own company had flourished in the wake of Fischer Morrow's massive deconsolidation, confirming her suspicions that he arranged the whole thing so that he could play clean-up.

Cobb, she knew, was at home in Los Angeles with his children. They hadn't exactly stayed in touch, but Professor Miles had been there to answer her questions whenever they arose. One of these days she really needed to travel down there and see him herself. She owed him a great debt for the world he'd shown her.

And hopefully he wouldn't slit her throat open when she did.

A sudden chill lanced through Ariadne as the nightmare resurfaced, and her grip on the handle tightened to the point where her already pale knuckles turned nearly translucent. Eventually it vanished into the distance like a passing train, and she exhaled heavily.

Closing her eyes and filling herself with one more deep breath, Ariadne pulled open the door and stepped inside.

She quickly discovered that the inside of the workshop was just as much intact as the outside had been. The rest of the crew was already waiting for her. Arthur stood there looking impeccably well-dressed as always, while Eames slouched in one of the lawn chairs flipping through a magazine. Yusuf was conversing with someone just outside her line of sight, and she stepped forward to see.

Ariadne immediately wished she hadn't.

"Professor Miles?" she blurted out, unable to contain her surprise. "What are you doing here?"

"Waiting for you, Princess," muttered Eames, who couldn't even be bothered to remove his eyes from the pages filled with supermodels.

For a moment Ariadne completely forgot about the surreal experience of discovering her Architecture Professor in a workshop surrounded by a cadre of professional thieves, and zeroed in entirely on the colorful new nickname.

"Princess?"

"Well you _are_ named after the daughter of a king," was his only explanation. "By the way, _normal_ people say hello first."

She rolled her eyes, but didn't give him the satisfaction of any further response. Good to see the Forger was already getting right to work tap-dancing all over her nerves.

Arthur stepped forward and answered her original question. "Miles," he began with what passed for a grin from him, "is the one with the job."

She didn't know how to respond to that. While he had obviously known Cobb by virtue of the fact that the Extractor had married his daughter, she never imagined that he knew very much about what it was that his son-in-law did. If he had, she doubted he would have consented to let him try to corrupt her. Even though she had come out of the experience a more well-rounded person, she hadn't imagined that he would see it that way if he knew.

The realization that he not only knew, but was gearing up to offer the team a job himself, was a little too much for her to swallow.

"Uh..." was her brilliant reply.

"I take it you weren't expecting this?" said Miles, demonstrating his uncanny ability to guess what she was thinking. Then again, she did resemble a deer on the highway right now.

"Not really," she answered honestly, fidgeting with the strap of her bag to stop it from digging into her shoulder. "I mean, I know you recommended me to Cobb, but..."

"You didn't think I knew what it was that job offer entailed," he finished, reading her mind again. "A lot of people assume that."

Something occurred to her in that moment. "Wait, you mean I wasn't the first?"

She heard Eames snicker behind her.

"Miles was the one who trained Cobb," Arthur helpfully explained. "And he helped a lot of us out when we started sharing dreams. Actually, he was the one who first developed the technology."

Ariadne was floored. "_You_ invented that?"

Ever humble, Miles simply chuckled. "I had more than a little help from the military and high-end corporations, but yes, I came up with the idea."

Somehow she couldn't imagine the man who had thoroughly impressed on her the importance of signing her papers inventing a device that enabled the theft of ideas. "What for?"

"Group therapy," Eames answered, still refusing to look up from his magazine.

She eyed the Professor more than a little skeptically, even though she silently admitted that such a thing made sense. "So then what happened?"

"In my experience, the more revolutionary the idea, the longer the line of greedy bastards there is waiting to use it for their own personal gain," Miles responded. "And even when it was just for exploring the subconscious, people were far more fascinated by the shared dreams themselves."

"Like Cobb and Mal?" she asked, then immediately wished she could strike that comment from the record when she saw a twinge of pain reveal itself on Miles' face.

"Yes," he replied, a practiced smile concealing his discomfort like a bandage over a grievous wound. For the first time, she wondered just how much of the kindly old professor act was just a façade.

Shifting her weight from heel to heel, Ariadne debated over how best to change the subject. "So... what's the job?" was the response she eventually decided on.

She heard Eames' magazine close behind her, and the Forger climbed to his feet with that insufferable smirk on his face. "I was waiting to see if you'd ask that. Have a seat."

Ariadne did as she was told, and the others took their chairs as well. Eames was grinning like a child at show-and-tell—did they practice that in Britain?—when he flipped the first page on the easel to reveal a face that came straight out of a bad dream.

"Everybody," he announced proudly, "meet the mark."

It was amazing, she reflected briefly, how quickly the tone of a situation could change; like a pleasant dream that suddenly morphed into a nightmare. It was rare that she experienced such a rapid turnaround in the real world, and yet that one action had completely changed her mind about this job.

She was on her feet before she even realized the extent to which she objected. "No," she declared with a sweep of her arm. "No way. You can't ask me to do that."

All of a sudden everybody was looking at her. She didn't like how much it reminded her of a certain crowd that held her in place while a French brunette rammed a butcher's knife through her small intestine. She knew the chances of such a thing happening now were small, but was fearful nonetheless.

"Can't do it without you, Ariadne," Arthur reminded her, ever the unflappable one. "Just sit back down and hear this out."

Everything in her body refused to accept that. The truth of the situation seemed to punch her in the chest, and an understanding filled her that left no room for reason. Like a nightmare that she couldn't wake up from, Ariadne felt more cornered than she'd ever been in her life. And here in reality, she couldn't take the easy way out.

She shook her head violently, heading unconsciously for the door. "Coming here was a mistake."

Turning on her heel, Ariadne started to run away as fast as she could, leaving the picture of Dom Cobb behind her like a half-remembered dream.

* * *

Author's Notes: "What's the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal parasite? ... An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold in the brain, it's almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood? That sticks."

And that, dear readers, is what possessed me to write this story. It's a perfect articulation of the problem that plagues me as a writer, because once I have an idea it has to get out. Even if it means leaving other ideas behind. I will be continuing my other stories, but I'd like to get a foothold in this fandom while it's still developing.

This idea came about almost immediately after I watched the movie and started checking out the fanfiction section. I've noticed that one of the most popular ideas seems to be having Ariadne go back for another job, so I've taken that and given it a little twist. I'm also poking a little fun at certain genre staples that have already started to develop, like calling the workshop a warehouse or writing everything in present tense. I like to take things apart and look at them, so hopefully you all will enjoy this little deconstruction as much as I will.

I'm trying something different with the imagery in this story. The opening scene is probably the most flowery thing I've ever written, but it has a purpose. It's the same reason I wrote that scene in present tense. I'm trying to avoid using dialogue as a crutch, and I want to make my narrative more fun to read. The trick, I've found, is not in using fancy words, but rather arranging ordinary ones in a way that evokes a specific tone. I hope it came across well, because it was absurdly difficult to integrate with my normal writing style.

I'm also going for shorter, more digestible chapters, which means forgoing my pathological urge to stuff at least one thousand words into every scene. It's difficult, but the story will be tighter because of it and updates will hopefully be swifter. It really depends on how well I can get this new writing style down.


	2. She'll Be Back

**Chapter Two**  
She'll Be Back

_This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe... whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes._  
-Morpheus, _The Matrix_

"Ariadne, wait!"

There was no outrunning the words, not without the aid of a supersonic jet at least. And even though Ariadne had come into a fortune after the last job, she wasn't _that_ frivolous. That still didn't mean that she had to acknowledge the speaker.

"Go away, Arthur," she shot back over her shoulder, failing utterly in her plan to ignore the Point Man until he went away. She didn't like how choked her voice sounded, like she was one strained syllable away from unleashing a river of tears. Not for the first time, she wished she had spent her money on an actual vehicle instead of just her tuition. She had told herself she enjoyed walking, but a fast car would really help her escape this situation right now.

"Ariadne!"

His hand gripped her wrist, and before she could catch herself Ariadne spun around purely on reflex and punched Arthur square in the nose. She would have apologized, but the fury boiling inside her prevented the word "sorry" from reaching her lips.

"Ow!" He released her immediately and squeezed the bridge of his nose to hold back the torrent of blood that her fist had set loose. "Ariadne, what the hell?"

"Don't grab me!" she spat, and continued marching away.

"Okay, I'm sorry about that," he insisted, quickening his pace so that he was in front of her. She halted, figuring that trying to move past him was an exercise in futility, and settled for glowering at the Point Man as though it would somehow make him burst into flame. "How did you do that, anyway?"

"I've been taking self-defense classes," she answered curtly.

That seemed to pique his interest for the moment. "Any particular reason?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe in case I'm trying to walk away from something I don't want to be part of and someone grabs me by the wrist."

She saw him visibly deflate at that. "I said I was sorry."

"I'm not sure I accept it. I told you, coming here was a mistake."

"You're not even going to hear us out?" he asked, almost pleading. She wondered what had happened to the cool, detached Arthur that kept the team from collapsing in its most stressful hour. Now he sounded almost desperate.

She crossed her arms. "I was going to until I found out who the mark is," she replied. "Dom's your _friend_, Arthur. How can you conspire against him like this?"

The Point Man sighed and didn't look at her. "Wouldn't be the first time," he nearly whispered.

The revelation cut through her anger like a shard of obsidian, returning her to the state of numbness she felt before embarking on her current tirade. "_What_?"

"I can explain everything if you'll just come inside," he promised, but Ariadne would hear none of it.

"Screw that. Explain now."

He stared at her as though he didn't know where to begin. Blood still trickled down his nostril and pooled above his lip, but he ignored it. "Fischer was never the target of inception," he revealed, and Ariadne had to stop her knees from giving out beneath her. "It was Dom."

The only reason Ariadne didn't immediately pull out her totem and test for reality was because her reaction to his words—anger, fear, surprise, and a tremendous knot in her stomach—felt exactly like a kick. She fumbled around in the darkness for words to reply, but none came.

"Mal was becoming a danger to all of us," Arthur continued, probably figuring that he needed to explain that. The blood was starting to dry on his face, and she was tempted to demote her scarf to a mere handkerchief in order to restore his features to their previous perfection. But his words paralyzed her. "He kept bringing her into dreams without even meaning to, and she screwed us over every time. He wouldn't listen to reason, so we had to take more drastic measures."

"So you pulled an inception on him?"

He nodded. "It was the hardest job we've ever had to do. Cobb's the best there ever was. We needed him to _choose_ to let go of Mal, and we couldn't let him know that we were behind it. So Saito and I arranged for the Cobol job to fail, which would force him to pull an inception on Fischer. At the same time, we would pull an inception on him."

"So wait," she interrupted, gesturing wildly with her arms. "This whole thing, the two weeks of planning, the three layers, breaking up Fischer Morrow... it was all a giant _therapy session_?"

"I guess you could say that," he admitted almost sheepishly. "And it wouldn't have been possible without you."

His words from earlier began to take on new meaning. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"You were the one constantly riding Cobb about letting go of his obsession," he answered. "Eames told me it was your idea to go down to Limbo to get Fischer and finish the job. I don't know what it was you did down there, but you changed Cobb's life."

The words took hold of Ariadne and did not let go. Her impassioned exhortations had been motivated by her concern for the rest of the team, who had no idea what kind of danger Cobb's subconscious posed. Had she actually been so persistent in Limbo that they had taken root in his mind, spreading throughout his entire being and convincing him to reject the shade of his late wife once and for all? If it were true, it most certainly hadn't been intentional on her part.

"Are you saying I was just a pawn in your twisted chess game?" she demanded, letting righteous anger seize control of her once more.

Arthur shook his head. "You're not a pawn, Ariadne."

"But I'm some kind of chess piece, right?" The sick irony of her choice in totems was not lost on the young Architect, and she resolved to toss the cursed thing into the river first chance she got. "You couldn't have bothered telling me all this before we went under?"

"I didn't want to tell you at all," he admitted. "But something happened and we need you back."

She felt like punching him in the nose again. "And what would that be, exactly?"

"Miles is worried the inception didn't take. He's been spending time with Cobb, and he thinks..."

Ariadne held up a hand to stop him. "You know what? I don't care that your stupid plan failed. You didn't think I needed to know in the first place, so why bother telling me now?"

"Because Cobb might end up like Mal."

_That _got her attention. "You mean he's going to commit suicide?"

"We can't know for certain. The job is to go inside his dreams and make sure the idea sticks this time."

Ariadne's hands hovered furiously in front of her face, grasping randomly as she tried to bring order to the chaotic jumble of thoughts that were crashing together like the most horrendous fifty car pile-up in history. "And just how in the hell do you plan on pulling that off? We got lucky with Fischer, and he had a militarized subconscious just because he got a little training. He didn't know who we were, and that's the _only _reason the Mr. Charles gambit worked."

"What's your point?"

"My _point_ is that Cobb was the greatest Extractor out there," she replied. "He knows us, and he knows how to tell when he's in a dream. Hell, you had to convince him he was incepting someone else to even pull it off in the first place. So what _exactly_ am I supposed to add to this little masquerade?"

"You're right," he admitted eventually, examining the asphalt beside her. "He knows every trick in the book, which is why we have to travel all the way down to Limbo to plant the idea."

She stood there dumbfounded. "_Limbo_? You need me to help you get down there? On _purpose_?"

"You're the only one besides Cobb, Fischer and Saito who's been there and come out of it with your mind intact. And we can't exactly count on any of them."

So Saito wasn't going to be showing up. And they obviously couldn't turn to Fischer, since that would involve explaining to him that the decision to dissolve his father's company and be his own man had not been his own. That left her.

"Assuming we can even pull this off," she began after a moment, "what makes you think I'm just going to go along with this? It involves lying to Cobb and giving him an idea that's not his."

"You didn't have any problems doing it with Fischer," he pointed out, and Ariadne was tempted to actually break his nose this time. Not only would it hurt, but it would leave a sizeable dent in his wallet to repair the damage. Fortunately for Arthur's hypothetical plastic surgery bills, she restrained herself.

"I didn't _know_ Fischer," she rebutted. "Besides, everything worked out in the end. We gave him closure with his father and warned him what a snake Browning was. He's a happier person now."

"And the same thing will happen with Cobb if you just give this a chance."

Ariadne took her time shaking her head so that her message could not be mistaken. "I can't do that, Arthur. I _won't _do that."

"If you don't, there's no telling what he'll do. He might decide his children are projections or try to wake up from reality. Only there's no waking up once you're dead."

"And he _knows_ that," she responded through clenched teeth. "He saw his wife take a swan dive out of a hotel window trying to 'wake up.' Do you _honestly_ think he's going to try that himself?"

Arthur frowned and said nothing.

"Do you know what I think?" she asked, though it wasn't really a question as she intended to continue whether he answered or not. "I don't think you're scared of Cobb killing himself. I think you're afraid he's going to find out what you did."

Again, her accusations were met with silence. Either he had no rebuttal for her words or he wasn't willing to share it. Regardless, she had no intention of finding out. She sidestepped around him and continued on her way.

"He'll come after you too, you know."

Ariadne stopped, but couldn't be bothered to turn around.

"If he finds out what happened. He'll come after you too."

She didn't spare him more than a glance over her shoulder. "I'll cross that bridge when I come to it."

* * *

The bleached white hallways are suffocating her, feeling so different from the fortress in the mountains but at the same time she knows that _this_ is what a hospital is supposed to look like. Right angles and linoleum tile are seemingly omnipresent, reinforcing the clinical atmosphere that she swears is trying to oppress her creative mind like a Soviet peasant.

In front of her stands an army of snack foods, endless permutations of the same basic idea that invariably results in massive calories and little to no actual nutrition. The same pattern repeats itself in the shape of a soda machine, but her choices are presented in menu form instead of little plastic baggies strung up on spirals. If she wants human interaction she supposes she could venture over to the cafeteria, but the vending machines provide her with all the company she needs.

"You know it helps if you put in money."

She sees his reflection, the dark hair slicked back with an almost unhealthy application of gel. She turns around and drinks in his custom suit and nondescript tie, savoring the aroma that lingers in the air between them. The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile.

"What are you doing here?"

"Well, when you told me you wanted to fly across the Atlantic just to visit your family, I thought you'd want to bring me along."

She frowns for reasons she can't fathom. "Yeah, but I come here every year. You were never interested in visiting before."

"I wasn't marrying you before," he rebuts handily, and she feels herself being pulled closer to him by a strong hand placed on the small of her back. "And I thought this would be a good opportunity to inform your folks."

"While we're mourning a guy in a coma? That hardly screams 'appropriate moment.'"

"And when _will_ it be 'appropriate?'" he challenges, tossing the last word back to her almost playfully.

"I don't know. Christmas dinner, maybe. Or some other holiday that doesn't revolve around staring at life support and brain monitors."

"Hey." His voice is soft, and she feels his breath stroking tiny fires on her skin. "I know this is hard for you. My grandfather spent the last five years of his life in a hospital. I know it's not exactly a fairy tale, but you have to learn to make the most of every moment in your life."

"I know," she breathes, pressing her forehead against his chest. "It's just... I've been coming here for so many years and it doesn't seem like he's ever going to wake up."

"He will," he promises, burying his fingers in the hair that surrounds her ears and pressing his lips against her forehead. "You just need to have faith."

She closes her eyes, letting the hospital dissolve away as it disappears from her sight. When she opens them again, his face is much closer, and just before their lips meet she hears an alarm wailing in the distance.

* * *

Beeping aggressively enough to warrant being thrown against a solid wall, Ariadne's alarm clock dragged her out of the world of dreams and back to the familiar confines of the dorm room. She slammed a fist down on the snooze button, then decided to simply move another button sideways along a hidden track, silencing the infernal device for good. She wasn't going to risk returning to that dream anyway.

Ariadne tossed her covers aside and bounded in the direction of the shower, since for _some reason_ she felt dirty all over. The domesticated waterfall greeted her like an old friend, cascading over her cream-colored skin and turning it red enough that she vowed to never visit a beach again as long as she lived. Her fair complexion belonged in long-sleeved blouses and silken scarves fastened around her neck and left to hang over her chest like a mere bandana. She simply wasn't designed for stretching out on extra-length towels and letting herself be bombarded by the sun.

Those thoughts led her down an ever-constricting maze of concepts that ended with a memory of stepping through a beach house into the hospital that seemed to haunt her dreams. Though last night's excursion had not been nearly as much of a nightmare as having her neck carved open by an outraged Extractor, it was no less unsettling to dwell on.

She supposed it wasn't odd to encounter Arthur in the dreamscape after exploding at him earlier in the evening, but the mental non sequitur of engaging in a romantic tryst with the Point Man was too much for her conscious brain to handle. It made perfect sense while it lasted, though.

Ariadne was suddenly compelled to study her wrists, fearful that somehow Arthur had invaded her dream in order to discretely reconcile their disagreement, but she knew that if the dream had been anything other than natural then her projections would have shredded him to pieces.

What bothered her about this more recent experience was that the details didn't simply flow downriver like they had with the first dream. It was vivid, almost as though she had accidentally stolen five minutes of another person's life. The only difference now was that she had regained her perspective, and was able to notice all the discrepancies compared to her real life. She wasn't marrying Arthur, she didn't have any family members in a coma, and snack machines did not possess the ability to paralyze her with indecision. The dream had, as Cobb pointed out when she first met him, felt real while she was in it. The belated realization that certain details were out of the ordinary had only set in once she awoke.

Once again she struggled to decipher what it all meant. Her subconscious was clearly trying to send her _some_ kind of message, otherwise it wouldn't have used the same place twice, nor would she have experienced two wildly different scenarios involving people from her waking life. Parallel universe? Unlikely, even if she did buy that theory. She was perfectly capable of creating universes on her own; she didn't need to rent one.

What, then? Ariadne pondered that question while she spread shampoo through the tangled mass that restless sleep had made of her hair, taking care to massage her scalp so that it took hold as close to the roots as possible. Her dream self seemed different somehow. She didn't quite talk the same, and the fates had somehow conspired to place her together with that equally strange reflection of Arthur. And without the aid of the Dreamshare, she could only experience things. She felt like a ghost that was trapped in a body identical to her own, unaware of her prison until after the alarm clock freed her.

She took a deep breath and held it tight as she surrendered her hair to the stream of water, letting it rinse all the imperfections away. The hair clung to her skin like a frightened child, but her hands kept it flowing long enough for the shampoo to be carried off with the water all the way down to the drain. When she released the breath, she sent her worries tumbling after them, cleansing herself emotionally now that the physical part was over. She halted the flow of water with a few twists of the knob, then pulled aside the curtain and stepped out to face the world.

The next several minutes were spent drying and then combing her hair, letting it settle into its natural waves. Ordinarily she would have dressed before preening herself, but since her roommate had yet to return she allowed herself this one indulgence. She wasn't as self-conscious as her extremely modest dress-code suggested, but she kept the bathroom door locked all the same. Her roommate was not one for knocking first.

After her hair had been combed to perfection, Ariadne tiptoed out of the bathroom like an old cartoon burglar. The towel lay discarded on the bathroom floor, since she had never quite mastered wearing it as a makeshift toga. Her chest wasn't large enough to support it on its own, and tying things was not her specialty. After about five steps, she abandoned all pretensions of sneakiness, scurried over to the hamper that she used in lieu of a dresser and began sifting through the clothing. Three minutes later she finished tying a yellow scarf around her neck to offset the red jacket and blue jeans. It wasn't until she caught her reflection in the window that she realized she had been wearing this exact outfit when she invaded Cobb's dream.

One minor adjustment to her ensemble later, which involved the use of a black sweater and a red scarf, Ariadne was ready to enjoy a hastily assembled meal of breakfast cereal and an apple that she munched on as she headed out the door. Aside from a frantic rush back up the stairs to retrieve her book bag, that was it for her morning ritual.

Throughout all of this, Ariadne made certain to focus on her tasks very intensely so that she would not remember the dream by the time it was done. Despite her most valiant efforts, however, it was waiting for her when she crossed the bridge. She knew the brain stored memories by association, and there was no escaping this one. Now she understood why Cobb had advised her to always imagine new places.

And so, in the time it took her to walk to the college, Ariadne had relived the dream over a dozen times. She examined its every detail, filing them away according to relevance for later analysis. Some part of her knew this was crazy, but it was stuck in her head like a bad Japanese pop song, which was yet another thing that made her thankful her roommate had decided to take such a long vacation. She needed to understand it if she was ever going to move on with her life.

When the college came into view, she remembered for the first time that morning that her first class was Architecture. She had been so engrossed in analyzing the dream in addition to her morning routine that it never crossed her mind until then to consider exactly how she was going to face Professor Miles after storming out of the workshop the day before. Would he be angry? Disappointed? Too many possibilities and no way to tell for certain until she was actually standing in front of the man who had allowed her to be exposed to the world of shared dreaming.

The thought of turning her back on the school and returning to her dorm for some more introspection was tempting, but Ariadne knew that if she didn't plan on chasing dreams then she couldn't simply walk away from reality. The money from the Fischer job wouldn't be there forever, and there were still many things she needed to learn. Also, Miles would know if she was avoiding him.

Sighing resignedly, Ariadne climbed the stairs and prepared to face the music.

* * *

"Ariadne."

'_Damn it all_,' the Architect cursed silently as the rest of the students filed past her out the door. When Miles had simply taken roll instead of casting a disapproving glare her way, she had allowed herself to cling to a tiny sliver of hope that she really could get through the rest of her life without ever discussing what had happened at the workshop. But luck always seemed to abandon her whenever she tried to actively court its influence. She did her best to look ashamed of herself as she trudged slowly up to the desk.

"Yes?" she squeaked.

Miles gave her a look that was more serious than anything she'd ever seen from him before. She knew what he would say next. That she was a fool for running away from people that needed her help and she should give the job a second chance. She'd spent the entire lecture imagining how that conversation would play out, and now that she had arrived at the moment of reckoning Ariadne realized that she had no idea what to say. She simply gulped and waited for the inevitable hurricane.

"I noticed you were having trouble paying attention during the lecture," he began instead, demolishing her carefully planned rebuttal before she even had a chance to voice it. "Is everything alright?"

She stood there dumbfounded for the second time in as many days. Of course it wasn't alright! Just yesterday she'd learned that he was the man who came up with the idea behind the device that allowed people to share dreams, and here he was talking to her like their relationship was still that of student and teacher. She went over her response in her head a few times until she was sure that she wouldn't stammer when she finally put it into words.

"Are you kidding me?" was what her mouth produced instead of the intended, "I'm fine, thank you." She considered stopping there, but realized that not explaining herself would only make the situation worse. "Yesterday I saw you standing in a workshop with people who were planning to go inside Cobb's head and _plant an idea_ in his _mind_," she continued. "And now you ask me if I'm alright?"

Miles frowned. "I suppose that counts as an answer." He looked down and started examining the papers that had migrated to his desk over the last hour. Hers was not among them. He continued this for about thirty seconds before Ariadne finally exploded.

"That's it? Are we just going to pretend like yesterday never happened?"

He looked up and adjusted his glasses. "I assumed that's what you wanted."

Ariadne felt like that question should have been easier to answer than it was. That _was_ what she wanted, right? To forget about everything that happened, to bury it deep in her subconscious and never worry about it again. But she had seen firsthand what holding onto a memory without receiving closure could do to a person. Even if she didn't intend to help him, she at least owed it to Miles to explain how she felt.

"What I _want_ is to know why you expected me to just take this whole thing in stride."

"Well, you seemed to warm up to Cobb's offer rather quickly," he explained. "And you've always enjoyed a chance to push the boundaries of what's possible. Tell me: what makes this job different?"

"The fact that I _know_ Cobb," she answered. "And he knows us. Fischer's subconscious didn't exactly lay down the red carpet for us, and he didn't even know about inception."

"So you're saying that you object to this because you feel a personal attachment to the mark."

Ariadne shrugged upon hearing the main thrust of her argument repeated back to her in its most basic form, which reminded her why Miles usually emerged victorious from their discussions. He wasn't putting words in her mouth, but rather stripping them of the periphery details until only the core remained. It still seemed perfectly justified to her.

"Yeah," she confirmed after further deliberation. "It kinda feels like betraying him, you know?"

He nodded solemnly. "I understand if you're hesitant."

Ariadne's stomach twisted into a pretzel as she considered his words. He wasn't pressuring her in the same way Arthur had, but at the same time she felt as though he was steering her closer to capitulation, positioning his pieces in preparation for the moment when she would have no choice other than to tip her king over and surrender.

"I'm not hesitant," she insisted after another pause that was far too long for her liking. "I've made up my mind that I'm not going to do this. It feels wrong."

"I see," was his only reply.

She would have been less put off by his words if he had spontaneously stood up and stomped a pigeon to death in front of her. "Look, you can drop the act, okay?" she demanded. "I know you're mad at me for running off and abandoning you guys, and this whole 'I understand what you're going through' shtick is designed to get me to stew in my own guilt to the point where I admit you're right and help you with the job! You're trying to make me go crazy!"

Miles only quirked an eyebrow. "You seem to be doing a fine job of that all by yourself," he remarked as though he was observing the weather. "And for the record, I _am_ leaving the decision entirely up to you. But since there is no job without your assistance, I don't feel the need to talk about it." His focus returned to the papers.

"Oh." Ariadne was reminded of the sudden onslaught of heat that assaulted her whenever she opened the oven as color flooded into her cheeks. "Sorry for blowing up at you like that."

"Apology accepted," he replied without looking at her.

She frowned and hooked her thumbs around the strap of her bag, pushing forward on the fabric that she knew would never snap. Even though he was behaving like the conversation was finished, she still had many more questions for the wise professor.

"Arthur told me you're worried about Cobb," she revealed after a moment, and his fountain pen halted in the middle of emblazoning a crimson "B" on top of a report. "Have you tried talking to him?"

"Of course I have," he answered, meeting her gaze once more. "But even before the job you helped him pull, he never did listen to conventional reason."

She nodded, having talked herself blue in the presence of the Extractor on more than one occasion. "But he let go of Mal," she pointed out. "He went home to his kids. Shouldn't he be happy?"

"You would think," Miles sighed as he finished marking the paper and set the pile aside. He removed his glasses and started rubbing his eyes with a thumb and forefinger before resting them on the desk. "I suppose he's worried about the fact that all his dreams have come true. He's starting to question whether it's even real."

Ariadne was starting to see where the rest of them were coming from. Still, they had methods of gauging reality. "Couldn't he just use his totem?"

"That's what I suggested, but he's convinced that it's been tainted."

"You mean someone else figured out how it works?" she wondered aloud before remembering that Cobb had outright explained to her that the top would never cease spinning in a dream. Arthur had observed that the Extractor spent an inordinate amount of time doing exactly what he told everybody not to do, resigning himself to a life spent warning others not to follow in his footsteps.

But that shouldn't have counted. She was the Architect, not the dreamer. She designed the layers, but it was Yusuf, Arthur and Eames who had brought them to life. What was Cobb so worried about?

"That and the fact that it wasn't _his_ totem originally," Miles explained. "To be completely honest, totems are a flawed concept to begin with."

Ariadne felt a cold lance of panic stab its way through her heart. "What do you mean?" she asked, terrified of the answer and the implications that would bring. Without a lifeline, how could she ever be certain that she wasn't drowning in a level below reality? Totems had seemed to be an obvious answer to that question, but now it was being cast into shadow just like everything related to the dream.

"It's a novel idea," he admitted. "Realizing that we're in a dream is one of the only ways to wake up from it. But the subconscious likes to trick itself. If someone else can recreate the way your totem functions as a way of deceiving you into thinking that a dream is reality, what stops you from doing the same?"

"The fact that I don't want to be trapped in a dream without knowing it."

"Yes, and you can tell that to your subconscious all you want, but it's never going to listen once it's made up its mind. And because your subconscious plays a rather substantial part in creating the dream world, as long as it's decided that you're better off dreaming, it'll never let you discern otherwise."

"But my subconscious wouldn't want to keep me under," she insisted. As exhilarating as it was creating cities from nothing, she would always prefer reality.

Miles raised an eyebrow. "Well we're not talking about you, are we?"

Oh, right. She had been so worried about what this revelation meant for her that she had forgotten that it was Cobb who was questioning reality. "You mean he's worried that his own subconscious has turned against him?"

"You saw what he turned Mal into, didn't you?"

He had a point, as usual. "But Mal was just a projection of his guilt," she insisted. "Not his entire subconscious."

"Which is true, but she wasn't 'just' a projection," he corrected. "Not by the time you encountered her. She was more like an extension of his personality. Someone who followed him from dream to dream. Projections are random shards of our minds that inhabit a shared dream, and they tend to take appearances based on how the dream is laid out, but Mal was different."

He leaned forward slightly as he continued. "You see, the more time a person spends in dreams, the more the subconscious starts to exercise its influence over them. The more it starts to develop a mind of its own."

She was frozen by his explanation, to the point where even shivering was beyond the realm of possibility. She knew that it had been difficult for Cobb to rid himself of Mal for good, but she never considered what might happen when he finally went back to a reality that felt like yet another half-remembered dream after everything he'd gone through. A breakthrough was not the same thing as a cure, and people weren't miraculously freed from their delusions by a simple epiphany. It just didn't work like that.

"So he's worried that he might still be trapped in a dream?"

"Essentially, yes. He has his doubts about that too, of course. Dom has grown accustomed to living a paradoxical life, trying to accept two realities at once. On the one hand he wants to believe that he's finally in reality, but he also knows that if this is a dream, he hasn't decided to wake up yet."

"So then what are we worried about?"

Miles frowned. "I just want him to accept things the way they are and stop trying to change what he can't affect. I thought he'd finally come back to reality when he left that top behind to go play with his children, but he's becoming obsessed again. I just want him to enjoy life for what it is."

In the silence that followed, he reached for his glasses and placed them back over the bridge of his nose, then resumed grading the papers. Ariadne stood there, lost in an ocean of thoughts.

Had she been wrong? Was it that bad of an idea to break her way into Cobb's dreams in an effort to understand him and help him let go of the fragments of his past? She'd done it before, after all. And this time, it wasn't entirely for selfish reasons.

Miles continued working in front of her, oblivious to her conflict. She was nearly sold by his words alone, but it was the honest emotion behind them that drove her decision. He honestly wanted to help Cobb. All of them did. And if the Extractor couldn't be convinced by what he would probably dismiss as the ravings of his own subconscious, then they would just have to intervene and make him believe. It was a dirty job, but somebody had to do it; why not the people who knew him best?

"Alright," she said after a few moments, and Miles looked up from the papers once again. "Count me in."

* * *

Author's Notes: Believe it or not, this isn't even the twist. That comes later. This chapter is where I set a lot of baselines, and I'm not going to discuss things too much for fear of giving away details that I want you guys to pick up on your own.

This took a lot longer than it should have, but I'm going for a high-quality narrative in this story because I've given myself a lot less room to play around in. The third scene took an ungodly amount of time to complete, mainly because I couldn't resist the urge to keep tinkering with it. What I came up with is as close to perfect as I could get it, so I hope you appreciate all the hard work I put into articulating my vision as clearly as I could.

One other thing I will note is something that I hope most of you have already picked up on, but that I'll explain anyway so you know what to expect from me. The chapter titles are all based on lines from the movie, and I'll be including quotes that relate to dreaming or from other works that feature dreaming as a major theme. I have quite a few good ones picked out.

Normally I'd go on for another few paragraphs, but I really think this chapter speaks for itself. I'm really interested in hearing what you all think.


	3. I Want Her Building Mazes

**Chapter Three**  
I Want Her Building Mazes

_I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake.  
-_Rene Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy"

"Okay," Arthur began, standing in front of the giant pad of paper that rested on the easel. "Brainstorming. How do we get Cobb to accept that the world is real?"

"Well like I told you blokes last time, you've got to start with the simplest possible version of the idea," Eames replied from his chair. "Otherwise the mind rejects it."

The Point Man nodded. "Very true. So what would that look like?"

Yusuf raised his hand. "How about 'the world is real?'"

Everybody stared at him.

"What?"

"If we're going to put it in those terms, we might as well just go and have a chat with the man right now," said Eames. "He's been telling himself that for years and it doesn't seem to have stuck."

"It's too subjective," agreed Arthur, tapping the marker he carried against the lower segment of his forefinger repeatedly. "The idea needs to imprint on his subconscious, and the subconscious needs to feed it back to him. Putting it that way relies too much on the conscious mind. You need a real emotional core to build the idea around."

Yusuf frowned like a student who missed his chance at a gold star and went back to examining the monstrous packet of information that Arthur had assembled for their perusal. So far he was the only one who bothered reading it.

"What if we start with his children?" Miles suggested, and all eyes turned in his direction. "His entire motivation during the previous job was to find a way home to them. We could use them as the main thrust of the idea."

Arthur nodded, understanding him instantly. He turned and began scrawling big black letters on the pad. "I want to be there for my children," he dictated aloud as he wrote.

"Not to criticize, but isn't that what he thinks already?" pointed out Ariadne, gesturing with a small black pen. "What good is giving him an idea he already has?"

"We're not trying to force him into believing something that goes against his basic desires like we did with Fischer," Arthur clarified. "What we're doing is reinforcing his connection to the part of his subconscious that wants to believe the world is real. With our help, it can grow powerful enough that it'll crush any doubts he still has."

She nodded, accepting the explanation. Eames often complained that the Point Man had no imagination, but he could be ruthlessly meticulous in the way he planned things and anticipated people's reactions. When it came to thinking fifteen moves ahead, Arthur had the advantage over all of them.

"So," he continued after a few moments of ponderous silence. "Now that we've settled on the idea, we need a way to get him in a position where we can pull him into a dream. Any suggestions?"

"I'm sure he'd be delighted to see us all again for a friendly dinner," Eames quipped dryly, but Arthur seemed to take the comment at face value.

"That could actually work. Miles, would you be able to pass on the message that we'd like to get together for a reunion?"

The Professor nodded. "I'm sure I can dredge up some excuse to arrange a happening. James and Philippa would certainly be delighted to have some of their father's associates over for a bite."

"Good," he said, nodding approvingly. "Ariadne."

She felt a frisson of excitement laced with small amounts of terror shudder through her abdomen when he called her name, almost like a kick. "Yes?"

"You've seen the way Cobb reconstructed his house in his dreams." It wasn't a question. "Do you think you could get to work designing that as a first layer?"

Ariadne creased her eyebrows at the request, but nodded all the same. "It's really just the dining room I remember, but yeah. Why do we need to do that if we're already going to be there in real life, though?"

"Familiar places help the subconscious feel safer," he explained. "It gets harder to tell you're in a dream the further down you go, and we don't want to blow it on the first level."

"So what do we plan on telling him in that first layer?" questioned Eames. "We're obviously not going to have dinner with the children present." He frowned. "Speaking of which, who's going to watch over the little brats while we're inside, anyway?"

"You're forgetting who looked after them while Cobb was away," Miles replied. "I can fill their grandmother in on the details and she can keep an eye on them as well as the rest of us while we're under."

"Wait, you're going in with us?" Ariadne protested, having been previously unaware of this detail. "I thought you were just giving us the job?"

"Yeah, Grandpa, no room for tourists," teased Eames.

"We need a dreamer for each of the three levels, so that two of us can go down to Limbo with Cobb," Arthur explained, staring straight at her. "I don't like the idea of you going in there with him all by yourself again. Miles will be the dreamer for the first layer, since he's familiar with the layout of the rest of the house. Yusuf can handle the second layer, and Eames will construct the third like last time. You and I will go down to Limbo with Cobb and plant the idea."

"Besides, I'm no tourist," the Professor reminded them. "I taught Dom everything he knows about the human mind, and there are several things I've discovered since then that he probably isn't aware of. I promise I'll keep good watch over all of you."

"That's all well and good, but how do we plan on getting him to stay unaware?" asked Eames. "I don't know if the rest of you have been keeping tabs on our favorite Extractor, but now that he can't make money stealing people's ideas he's gone into the business of protecting them from thieves."

"You mean like whoever taught Fischer?" Ariadne questioned, and was rewarded with a series of nods.

"You have to think like a thief to defend yourself against one," Arthur mused out loud.

"Yes, exactly," the Forger continued. "So how do we expect to fool a man who's taken to playing Mr. Charles in real life?"

The mention of that name, besides bringing up memories of a hotel lobby and a very awkward kiss that she had tried very hard not to dream about the first few nights after the inception, gave Ariadne the inspiration she needed to form a brilliant plan.

"_We_ could do that," she suggested, and everybody looked to her.

"I beg your pardon, sweetheart?"

"Look, we're never going to fool Cobb into thinking he's not in a dream, so why even bother?" she clarified. "We could convince him that he needs our help with something."

"Oh, that's a _marvelous_ idea," the Englishman deadpanned. "Just come right out and tell him that we're there for an intervention. Should we start by telling him we all love him very much and that he's welcome to share anything he wants with us?"

Arthur fixed him with a cold glare, but he didn't need to avenge her. "Well we obviously don't tell him why we're _really_ there," she retorted. "Just make up some excuse and convince him to help us break into his own subconscious so he can get closure."

"And get torn to shreds by every projection in a one mile radius?" he countered. "No bloody thank you."

"That idea has potential," said Arthur, leaping to her rescue even though it wasn't necessary. "There won't be any projections in the first layer if he still thinks he's having a private dinner with us. But we need something compelling enough to cover up the real reason."

The conversation ran out of fuel and they began contemplating what exactly could steer Cobb's attention away from their real agenda. It wasn't like Fischer, where they could take advantage of his relative inexperience with dreams even though his subconscious had enough guns to overthrow a third world country. They knew what they were up against, but so did he, because they had worked with each other so closely. This would make it easier to persuade him to cooperate, but it also made it more difficult to convince him that they were actually there to help.

"Mal," Ariadne suggested eventually. "We could convince him that he still hasn't let go of her, and he needs our help to do it. He knows how much trouble she can cause; he'd have to go along with us."

"Okay, even I have to admit that's pretty bloody brilliant," Eames replied after a few moments. "Even if it is totally insane on a level that rivals the man we're targeting. But how are you planning on convincing him that she's still around?"

Once again, everybody stared.

"_Oh_," he muttered scornfully once he comprehended. "I see where this is going. No bleeding way."

"But you look so pretty in a dress," Arthur teased, and she saw the Forger's eyes ignite like raging bonfires. She noticed that those two tended to target each other with their barbs almost exclusively. She didn't know what it was about their relationship that brought out that side of them, but Ariadne found it amusing to watch.

"Glad you've been paying so much attention to that, Darling, but I have a _strict_ rule against impersonating dead people," he retorted. "Besides, the man carried her memory around with him everywhere he went like a pocket watch; do you really think he won't be able to tell the difference?"

"We just need you to come in and cause some trouble," the Point Man explained. "After that his own subconscious should pick up on the hints and resurrect her in the second layer."

Ariadne had been listening passively as they debated her idea, but now it had snowballed out of control. "Wait, what?" she shrieked, drawing the attention of the others yet again. She had intended for Eames to impersonate the departed shade on all three levels; not bring the monster back to life. "Wouldn't that undo everything we fought for the first time?"

"Not if he's chosen to reject her," Miles opined. "If we introduce her in the first layer, it shouldn't be deep enough for an inception to take place. His mind will be able to trace the idea and oppose the projection instead of feeding his obsession like he did before our intervention. If he really wants to come back to reality, he'll be motivated to ensure that she gets eradicated for good."

"Which just begs the question of how the hell we're going to plant an idea subtly enough that he won't trace it back to us," Eames pointed out. "He _invented_ the Mr. Charles gambit. The man knows his way around mental trickery."

"That's why we're going down to Limbo, though," Ariadne replied. "It's a massive shared subconscious. It's easy for even the most experienced lucid dreamers to get lost down there and accept it as their reality, so we know his mental defenses will be at their lowest. He spent fifty years down there with Mal. They knew everything about each other, and he was still able to sneak in and give her the idea that her world wasn't real."

Once again, every eye in the room had turned to her. "What?"

"Did I just hear you say that Cobb incepted his own wife?" asked Eames.

"Yeah," she answered, uncomprehending. "Didn't you already know that?"

Everybody shook their heads, and it dawned on her too late that she had been the only witness to Cobb's confession. She assumed that the others had already known with the way they kept secrets from her and revealed them just when it seemed dramatically appropriate, but it hadn't occurred to her that the Extractor had done the same to them.

"I fucking knew it," Arthur muttered, and she nearly tumbled out of her chair at the curse. For a moment she considered reaching for her totem and testing for reality right there on the floor of the workshop, but part of her was curious as to what would happen next. Besides, totems could be tainted if other people saw them in action.

"So he kept it from you too, then," the Forger realized with a trace of sadistic glee, his rivalry with the Point Man trumping the outrage he had briefly displayed only moments before. "Suddenly that mournful attitude of his makes sense."

Ariadne cast a sympathetic glance over at Miles, who hadn't spoken. "That's why Cobb always felt so guilty," she revealed. "He thought he was responsible for Mal killing herself."

"Sounds to me like he was," Eames opined, but everyone ignored the comment.

Miles nodded and continued saying nothing. She knew it was just one more wound on top of many, and she wondered how many times a man could be confronted with heartbreaking revelations before he finally snapped. For his part, the Professor took the news in remarkable stride.

"So does this change things?" she wondered once a few moments had passed.

"Well, it confirms that pulling that kind of inception is possible," Arthur observed, his tone noticeably colder than it had been before the Architect had spilled her guts. "But it also means he's familiar with how Limbo works. We need to put on a really good show to throw him off the trail of what we're really doing."

"Which I'd like to remind everybody is just shy of impossible," Eames took the opportunity to inform them.

"So was inception," she pointed out.

"Never said I didn't like it that way, Princess."

Again with the nickname. She hadn't heard him refer to the others by anything other than their real names, with the exception of Arthur. Did that mean she was going to have to start exchanging sarcastic quips with the Forger as well? At least it meant he was including her, in his own mischievous way.

Arthur had not ceased frowning, which was unusual even for his stoic personality. She didn't need to enter his dreams to extract the reason why, though. She had been the one who brought it up.

"Okay, I suppose that's as good as our plan's going to get right now," he said after a few moments. "We'll need to get started right away. Ariadne, I want you to start sketching up the first layer; Eames and Yusuf, start brainstorming ideas for the second and third levels. Miles..." He trailed off when he saw the resigned expression on the older man's face. "We need to talk."

Nobody moved right away, as though they were waiting for some sort of signal. Arthur provided it a moment later. "Let's get to work."

* * *

It only took a couple hours for her to sketch out the blueprints, gather materials, and get halfway done with the scale model of Cobb's dining room, in which time Miles had to leave to teach another class, while Eames sat around reading magazines for "inspiration," and Arthur never stopped frowning as he ironed out the details of their plan. They had begun working more or less immediately, leaving her to assume her duties without anybody having to explain them to her. She fell back into her work easily, as though the intervening months between this job and the last had never occurred.

Ariadne hadn't really been expecting it to be this easy. The last time she worked a job with them, she spent nearly every minute of it either asking how dreams worked or building mazes out of cardboard. The planning sessions felt more like educational lectures, and she was too enraptured by the sheer scope of the dream world to really do anything besides listen quietly and ask questions when they mentioned something that she didn't understand. Now that she comprehended the basics, however, she was able to participate far more effectively than she ever could have imagined. Given that her imagination had gotten her hired, that was saying something.

However, she had clearly overstepped her bounds near the end there. Subtlety was a skill she had yet to develop, whereas the others seemed to have mastered it. If they were going to keep the nature of their activities hidden from Cobb, she had to get better at concealing the truth, or at least be more careful when she revealed it and to whom.

She was almost finished sculpting a miniature chair when Yusuf decided to materialize beside her.

"I was wondering—"

Ariadne sprang upright and let out a muffled shriek, which had the benefit of assuring her that she was, in fact, still awake. It also caused the modeling cardboard to crumple in her hand as she squeezed involuntarily, meaning she would have to begin the intricate task of chair-carving all over again. She fixed the Chemist with an annoyed glare. "_What_?"

"Sorry. I was wondering if you had any ideas for the second layer. It's not really my area of expertise."

She supposed she might have been more charitable if he hadn't just startled her horribly, but right now Ariadne was not in a giving mood. "Kind of busy with my own work right now."

The words didn't seem to affect him much, and he stayed where he was. Ariadne rolled her eyes and continued pressing her assault. "Haven't you done it before?"

"Dreaming the level? Of course. But I wasn't the one who came up with it last time. I spend most of my time working on sedatives."

"Well then why don't you go back to your beakers and leave me alone?" she snapped, though even she admitted that was a little cruel.

"Because Arthur told me to come up with an idea for the second layer," he reminded her.

"And you decided to dump that task on me? Gee, thanks."

Yusuf tilted his head to one side to try and examine her better. "Are you alright? I could give you something to help you relax."

The Architect shook her head. "No thanks," she answered, then frowned. "Sorry, by the way. I'm just a little stressed."

"For the record, I wasn't going to dump it on you," he revealed. "It's just that you have such a talent for coming up with brilliant ideas. That plan you thought up back there; that was incredible. I can see why Cobb chose you."

Well, now she felt like a bitch. "Um, thank you."

"You're welcome. You don't have to help me if you don't want to, but you understand how Cobb's mind works better than I do."

She cocked an eyebrow. "Didn't you know him before?"

The Chemist shook his head. "The first time I met him was when Eames brought him to my shop in Mombasa. I did have experience with dreaming before then, of course, but it was the first time I'd been asked to help pull off an inception."

"Did you know who the real target was?"

"No more than you did," he revealed. "Arthur and Saito were playing their hands pretty close to their chest. I think Eames was the only other member who knew anything about it."

She nodded sympathetically, secretly relieved that she hadn't been the only one kept in the dark. "Didn't trust you either, huh?"

"Well, they didn't really have any reason to tell me," he admitted, shrugging. "All I need to worry about is making sure there's enough sedative to keep the dream stable. Figuring out what to do in each dream is really something the rest of you excel at."

"Yeah, I noticed you didn't say much while we were planning."

Yusuf chuckled. "It was really the only idea I had."

She smiled back at him. "So what have you got so far?"

"Well, since we're going to be using his kids as the main idea, I was thinking something like a kindergarten or a day care center," he replied.

Ariadne shook her head. "Not sure that would work. Cobb didn't see his kids for a few years, and from what Miles told me they were really big on spending time with them at home. Besides, if we're gonna be bringing Mal back to life, the last thing I want is to put her in a room with a bunch of children."

"They'd just be projections," he insisted, apparently not understanding her.

"Still doesn't mean I want to see it happen. And if we're trying to get him to accept reality then we don't want to trigger memories. It's not a good idea to make things harder to distinguish."

"So then what do you suggest?"

Ariadne tapped the dull end of a scalpel against her lip as she pondered that. "Well, if we're going for a tiny, intimate setup in the first layer, then we really need to open up the second one and make a big maze. Preferably someplace you're familiar with so you can memorize it easier."

"I know Mombasa like the wrinkles on the back of my mother's hand," he assured her. "Eames does as well."

"Okay, we can use that as a template," she decided, gently scooting the model aside before procuring some draft paper and a pencil. "Dom's been there too so we don't want to make it an exact copy. But colors, textures, smells... you can recreate all that, can't you?"

She looked up when he didn't reply and saw him blinking at her. "Uh, Yusuf?" She waved slowly. "Yoo-hoo? Hey, you there?"

"Huh?" he blinked and rapidly shook his head as if trying to clear out any lingering distractions. "Sorry, it's just... I've never seen anybody pick this up so quickly before."

The unexpected praise made her feel like her face was dangerously close to a campfire. "You're just trying to flatter me so I won't punish you for making me crush the chair," she deduced, pointing the scalpel at him menacingly. Of course; it was so obvious now.

"I'm serious," he insisted. "And I already apologized for startling you. But you know why Cobb picked the rest of us, right? He was trying to put together the first team that could successfully pull off an inception. That means he wouldn't settle for anything other than the absolute best."

"Or the best he could find," she rebutted. "He was running out of Architects."

"And yet you were the one who not only helped pull off the job, but also brought him peace of mind. Without any prior experience, even. That's true genius right there."

Ariadne shook her head, though inwardly she wondered why she insisted on maintaining this bashful image that did not fit her at all. Maybe she just wasn't sure what he aimed to accomplish by lavishing so many compliments on her. "Well if I did my job so well, how come we need to go back in and finish it?"

"Hey, that's Cobb's fault for not accepting reality, not yours. You did achieve a partial success, though; you got him to let go of Mal."

"And now we're going to march right back in there and make him bring her back to life," she retorted. "And what's worse, _I'm_ the one who came up with that idea."

The Chemist just stared at her sympathetically. "Are you sure I can't give you something?"

"I'm _fine_, Yusuf," she insisted, not wanting to share with him her phobia of waking up naked on someone's floor that had kept her from drinking alcohol even though she'd been legally able to do so for years. She knew that he was most likely harmless given that everybody trusted him to keep an eye on them while they slept, but fears didn't have to be rational.

"If you say so." He shrugged. "But I don't understand why you're so reluctant to think highly of yourself."

"I just don't normally get a lot of compliments," she admitted rather sheepishly. "And when I do I usually assume the guy is hitting on me."

That made Yusuf's eyes widen and he immediately put an extra foot of space between them. Ariadne rolled her eyes.

"Oh, come on. If I thought you guys were like that I wouldn't have worked the first job," she reassured him.

He exhaled and appeared suitably mollified. "You are a very talented woman, Ariadne," he told her. "I just wanted to let you know that."

"I already know, thanks. I just... don't like being reminded of it when I'm using those talents for something like this."

"Then why are you doing this job at all?"

The Architect frowned. "Someone has to," she decided eventually.

* * *

Night came too quickly for Ariadne, who had just put the finishing touches on the model when her mind registered that it was nearly midnight. Working in her little enclosure, cordoned off from the rest of the workshop, she had not interacted much with the rest of the team aside from the planning session and Yusuf's surprise visit wherein he gave her more compliments than she knew what to do with. Ariadne had learned during her first year that once she became engrossed in a task, it was very easy to lose herself in it.

Sort of like where they intended to go in the dream.

She set down the scalpel and rubbed her eyes, then wandered out into the rest of the workshop where she saw Arthur still taking notes off a laptop.

"Do you really need to do so much research into your best friend?" she asked him, and succeeded in getting him to look away from the screen. "Not that it's a bad idea to be prepared, but... how much else can you really learn?"

"Cobb and I were partners, not friends," he corrected, returning his focus to the laptop. "And there's a lot I didn't know about him."

She'd had enough conversations with Arthur to recognize when he was taking a subtle shot at her, and cringed. She deserved that.

"Sorry I didn't tell you about Mal earlier," she replied, hoping to appease him.

At the very least, she got him to look at her again. "You don't have anything to apologize for," he insisted. "It was Cobb who kept it from all of us. You're not responsible for his secrets."

"I should still probably be more careful with them," she admitted, more to herself than the Point Man. "It looked like I really upset Miles."

"He'll be fine the next time you see him," Arthur promised, and she knew he was telling the truth. "To be honest I think we were all just surprised that he told _you_ over any of us."

"We were in Limbo," she explained, striding closer to the desk so her words didn't have to cross quite so much air to reach him. "And he was staring right at Mal when he said it. I think that was his way of confessing it to himself so he didn't have to keep it suppressed anymore. I just happened to be there when he said it."

"You helped guide him to that point," he insisted, not letting her downplay her role any more than Yusuf had. "I told you before, the inception wouldn't have worked without you."

Ariadne frowned as a new thought surfaced. "That's another thing I've been wondering," she responded. "How exactly did you know what Cobb was going to do? How did you know what _I _was going to do? You can't honestly tell me you planned things to happen the way they did."

"We didn't," he admitted, which only raised her suspicions more. "We had a plan, of course, but now that I look back on it there's no way it would have worked nearly as well as what you did. That's the thing with plans: you need one so you have some idea what to do, but you can never really predict what's going to happen in the dream. Even though we're creating it, there are certain things that go beyond our control. The trick is being resourceful enough to make things work in spite of the plan being the first thing that goes out the window."

She had already suspected it was something along those lines, but she already had another question. "But why didn't you tell me what you were really planning?"

"Would you have agreed to it if you knew?"

Ariadne threw out her arms and held them parallel to her head. "I'm here, aren't I?"

"Only because you know it can work and you don't back down from a challenge that you know it's possible for you to complete," he rebutted. "Back then you hadn't proven yourself yet, and it was Cobb's idea to recruit you. Miles did the best he could choosing you, but you were never part of the original plan." One corner of his lips curled slightly upward. "That turned out to be a good thing, though."

"So you were just going to go into the dream, follow Cobb around and hope for the best?" she summarized in disbelief.

"Not in those exact terms, but we didn't really have much of an endgame planned," he admitted. "And we couldn't have anticipated that Fischer's subconscious would be armed. Remember, we were supposed to have a week at the first level."

"And what would you have done if it didn't work?"

"Assuming it didn't land us in Limbo where none of it would matter anyway, try again," he answered with a shrug. "The goal was to get Cobb to let go of his personal demons and send him home where he could be happy. Until that happened he wasn't exactly going anywhere."

"Those are some awfully nice reasons for a 'partner,'" she observed.

"When you step inside each other's dreams for a living, it kind of brings you closer together," Arthur admitted, and she could see the logic behind that. "And Mal wasn't just a danger to him. He jeopardized all of us whenever he brought her memory into a dream. Getting him to come to terms with his issues was the best thing for everybody."

"So you told me when we first went over this," she reminded him.

The Point Man only smiled.

"Well, I'm gonna head home now," she announced after the momentary lull had extended into a silence that was just shy of awkward.

He nodded without even taking his eyes off the laptop. "See you tomorrow."

Ariadne had no idea where the thought came from, but she smirked before launching what seemed like a witty retort to her exhausted mind. "Not gonna walk me home?"

He glanced back to her with a bemused expression that quickly morphed into a smile to counter hers. "Are you saying that because you want me to?"

"Not really," she admitted, leaning to the side and catching herself just before she fell. The inanity of the conversation had just started to dawn on her, and she wondered why she brought it up in the first place. "But you have to admit it's dark outside. Some creep could come up and grab me from behind."

"And I'm sure you'd give them a good punch in the nose to think about," he retorted with the barest of smirks.

She frowned. "Sorry about that, by the way. I kind of just hit you on instinct; I wasn't actually that mad at you."

"You certainly acted the part."

Now her brow wrinkled, and her dejected expression was one pouted lip away from being complete.

Arthur sighed. "Look, you don't have to apologize. I really shouldn't have grabbed you like that. I should have trusted you to make your own decisions."

She didn't have a reply for that.

"I _do_ trust you, Ariadne," he continued. "You're a valuable member of the team, and none of this would be possible without you."

The Architect groaned. "Would you guys quit making me sound so important? I'm under enough pressure without feeling like this entire thing hinges on me."

"It doesn't, not really," he replied bluntly. "You're only one member of the team. A very important member, but it's really all of our efforts combined that makes what we do work."

That was the first thing she'd heard today that truly made her feel better. It wasn't that she had anything against feeling important; she just didn't want to drop the ball without knowing that someone else would be there to recover it.

Arthur smiled and stared at some distant point in the center of the workshop. "You know, before he lost Mal, Cobb was happy just being an Architect. He was always so on fire with ideas, always coming up with something crazy to top the last stunt we managed to pull off. Hell, even after she died he really pushed himself to the limit and thought of things that were so insane he needed an equally crazy crew to carry them out."

"I appreciate that you think I'm crazy," she remarked. "Is there a point you're driving at?"

He grinned. "It wasn't until you suggested we pull the Mr. Charles gambit on the man who invented it that I realized how much you remind me of that younger version of him."

If Yusuf's comments had made her blush, Ariadne was afraid her head would explode from that statement. Luckily, her brain matter stayed where it was. "So you're saying you need someone who reminds you of Cobb so the team feels complete again?" she translated, feeling slightly less flattered the more she pondered it.

"A dream would never amount to anything if it wasn't for imagination," he replied. "And that's not the entire reason."

"Oh?" She cocked an eyebrow.

"Not even Cobb picked up dreaming as quickly as you did. You pulled off two inceptions on your first try, one without even meaning to. You're an amazingly talented Architect, and we're better off with you on our team."

"Okay, you seriously need to stop with the compliments," she demanded as her cheeks burned. "I'm starting to look like a lobster."

He smirked. "I thought you were going home anyway?"

"So did I. But I guess that dream is over with."

Arthur laughed. "Do you want me to walk you out?"

"No, I've got it," she insisted, uncertain if she could handle walking home while the Point Man showered her with compliments. She might actually die of the embarrassment of living out such a perfect cliché. "See you tomorrow."

"Sweet dreams," was all he told her before returning his focus to the laptop.

* * *

Author's Notes: I think this is the first time I've gotten to a third chapter in over two years. Usually my interest tapers off before then. So I guess that's an accomplishment.

I had a discussion with one of my reviewers who felt I kind of overdid it on the description in the first two chapters, and I sort of agree. The main thrust of the complaint was that the imagery remains largely the same between the dream scenes and the rest of the story, which I can actually see as being confusing. While I certainly didn't plan for it, this actually reflects how dreams and reality often blur together right after waking. However, I was taking it to a point where I just indulged in the pretty descriptions for their own sake, which I'd rather avoid if I can help it. So when they make another appearance (and believe me, they will), I'll have a reason for them.

I took a hammer to a lot of the tropes that have started to develop among stories of this nature, particularly Arthur/Ariadne ones (which I adore anyway because those two are just so cute). One of the major issues I see with those stories is that they treat Ariadne as an inexperienced, almost wishy-washy teenager. While she is indeed new to the world of dreaming, she's established as being able to pick up the basics quickly and run with them. There's just no need to turn her into a damsel so Arthur can come along and save her from her own crippling incompetence. She's very headstrong and driven, and capable of coming up with some truly brilliant ideas. Miles wasn't kidding when he referred to her as "someone better." I also poked fun at the inexplicable tendency of those stories to feature a scene where Arthur walks her home, but that was more tongue-in-cheek because I actually like cute romantic scenes. They're a guilty pleasure.

Of course, my personal favorite part of this chapter is the fabulous team dynamic that Christopher Nolan developed, and the first scene was absurdly fun to write. I really let myself run wild with the dialogue in this chapter, and I hope it comes off well. I also decided to give Yusuf a major part in the second scene, if only because I felt bad for excluding him from the first scene beyond a throwaway joke at the beginning. But he himself notes that he doesn't really have a problem with it, so there.

I've already rambled for long enough, so I'll just stop there. Thanks to everyone for reading!


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